On a whim I decided to give the official app a try because a lot of people will be forced to use it, if they decide to stay on Reddit.
Holy hell, it’s just slow. Can’t scroll through a subreddit without annoying hitches and stutters. Comments aren’t any better also.
On the other hand, Sync is just fucking gorgeous and runs immensely better than the encumbered official app.
How can apps made by small teams or even a single person be better optimized than one supposedly made by a larger team with a larger development budget?
Reddit app has to cram in those ads, and they don’t want you to scroll too fast past those gorgeous ads.
Or reddit is refusing to pay their developers well, while small app projects are made out of passion.
Not just ads, but trackers and whatever else they can use to wrangle data from your phone.
Yep. It’s like adobe acrobat reader.
You can use the official app. Slow and bloated.
You can use something like sumatra or foxit, they’re faster and takes up almost no diskspace.
IRC acrobat has trackers and telemetry included, allowing it to send data to adobe about where your mouse hovered, etc. etc.
Same for reddit. Reddit.com doesn’t consider users customers. We’re product. There to be mined for (personal) data.
Ads… Ads everywhere…
It’s reaching Facebook levels. I just can’t.
The API pricing is shit, but I care more about how I’m forced into an app with ads. That’s really the straw that made me seek alternatives in earnest.
The app also heats up my phone like games do.
RiF and Sync do not. Because they are made by people who care about user experience.
Takes a lot of power to do that data collection…
Sync is so good, it’s what I use(d) Reddit with. Good news is that Sync isn’t dead, it’s being reborn with support for Lemmy.
https://teddit.net/r/SyncforLemmy/comments/14ee1ul
Edit: Redirect link to old Reddit for sanity.
Edit2: Redirect link again to avoid Reddit altogether thanks to aidenxy’s better solution.I tried it over a year after its initial release, thinking they’d have time to sort out the biggest problems. I thought other redditors were possibly exaggerating, or recalling their experiences with an earlier version. It couldn’t be that bad, right?
Yeah, it could. Wow. They’re trying to encourage people to use an app that’s utter shit. It’s an… interesting strategy.
Reddit’s priorities aren’t the same as someone developing an app for ease of use, readability, accessibility, etc. Reddit only cares about the backend tech that helps them control and serve ad space. And if you want to believe the bts tea that recently spilled, Reddit doesn’t even structurally prioritize coding and development in the first place.
I was an rif die-hard. Such an elegant, useful app. It’s nothing like its source site.
The people that stay never knew they could have something better. It’s like people that don’t mind the ads, on Reddit or otherwise. If they never got exposed to the pre-ads Internet or to a good ad blocker, they don’t even know they could complain about this experience.
It’s crazy to me that people still don’t know of adblockers in 2023 but there’s an absolute shit-ton of those people.
Give it a one star on the way out!
They’ll just pay Google to up it again.
make them pay
At least it will cost reddit money
Don’t download it just to try! It has trackers be careful. Is better not to ever download it really.
